Reviews for Advanced Rails

1. Great on Ruby Weak on Deployment

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, March 12th, 2008

   Whilst there have been books for those seeking an introduction to Rails for some time, and a number of books for those wishing to learn Ruby, there hasn't been much in the way of material that bridges the two. There's David A Blacks' excellent Ruby for Rails of course but that chooses to focus on Ruby's idioms in the context of generalized application programming.
   The first three chapters of Advanced Rails take these ideas a bit further by placing Ruby use in the context of Rails. The author demonstrates how Ruby features such as introspection and method binding are used in framework features such as routing and the plug-in architecture.
   The writing style is detailed enough to explain exactly what is going on and light enough not to get repetitive or confusing. It is in these opening chapters that the book excels.
   
   The second part of the book deals with more generalized application development : database choice, security and performance improvements. Unfortunately these aren't covered in sufficient depth to make them de facto reading. The problem, of course, is that these are areas of Rails that are constantly in flux with new products and solutions coming along every fews months, with the risk that the writing could soon become outdated. However I still think there was scope for a more in depth analysis of these areas.